News round up: Brown to promise crackdown on bad parents

Gordon Brown will try to reconnect with middle Britain, and rescue his drifting leadership, by using his speech to Labour’s conference today to return to the Blairite agenda of tough measures on irresponsible parenting and social breakdown.

The prime minister will say parents of errant children must lose access to benefits unless they agree to accept support to improve their parenting skills. It reflects overwhelming internal polling evidence that the public want stronger action on antisocial behaviour and blame society’s ills on family breakdown.

Police and council officials have faced a barrage of criticism after failing to act against the gang and Leicestershire Police were accused of failing in their duty to protect the public from the torment of anti-social behaviour.

Miss Pilkington, 38, killed herself and her daughter Francesca, 18, who had a mental age of four, by setting light to her Austin Maestro while they both sat inside at a lay-by near her home in Barwell, Leicestershire.

When children are taken into care, many of their parents will begin – or continue – a desperate downward spiral into drink, drugs, homelessness and depression. Some commit suicide. Some end up in prison. Many become pregnant again in an attempt to replace the child they have lost. Sometimes those babies will then be taken into care for their own protection, occasionally at birth. And so the traumatic cycle continues to destroy generations of lives.

Just sometimes, that cycle is broken, but it needs a very special intervention to save families judged to be such a risk to their youngest and most vulnerable members that the state has to step in.

Ofsted has “lost the plot” by telling two police officers they broke the law by caring for each other’s children, it was claimed today.

Margaret Morrissey, of the parents’ pressure group, ParentsOutloud, said: “If we have reached the point in our society when we cannot trust our very close friends to look after each other’s children, I think it is time to give up and go and live in another country.”

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